1 Month with Manga UP

By hikaru on 8 Sep 2022 • ( Leave a comment )

While Jump Comics are my go-to manga anthologies, Square Enix’s Gangan Comics is the definite second. So I was really excited when I heard Square Enix was launching their own manga app in English. It has been over one month since the app launched and given I’m still diligently using it, it must be doing something right….despite doing oh-so-much wrong 😝

Things I Like

The range of offerings. Sure there is a lot of isekai but SQEX keeps adding really great series that are outside my usual shonen fare but still to my taste. There are definitely more series with an (older) female skew than say Jump Plus.
The reader itself works nicely on my Boox, better than most other manga apps (the best performing is still probably Shonen Jump App)
They have some sort of notification system to let you know there are new ‘chapters’ (although for reasons below it isn’t that useful, but I still appreciate that there is something)

Things That Are Bad But Don’t Bother Me

Pay to rent – it doesn’t bother me because I personally use manga apps as a way to figure out what series to add to my collection. If I want to reread something I will buy it physically (or digitally if that’s my only option). I know that some series might not get a release at all, but there is enough content out there that I won’t get too torn up about it.
Splitting the ‘chapters’ into parts – I kinda get that they need some way to ‘equalise’ the content between series with differing chapter lengths. The actual concept of splitting chapters doesn’t bother me. See below for a rant about the implementation 🙃
Censorship – it’s terrible, but most of the series I am reading don’t have content that is negatively affected by the ‘black box syndrome’. And as I plan to buy any series I really like, it just gives that little more incentive/value to a reread 😋 (oh wait, turns out they disabled this two days ago hahahahah)
Three currency system – it confused the hell outta me at first, but after my initial spending to catch up on The Apothecary Diaries, it’s highly unlikely I will ever pay for anything again so now I can just ignore it.

Things That Are Bad And Annoy Me

Inconsistent splitting of chapters. Split the chapters if you must but can’t they at least make the number of segments the same within each series?! Before I decide to read something I always end up scrolling to see how many parts the next chapter is split into, so I can figure out how to best ‘spend’ my UP. If this is SQEX’s way of trying to trick people into ‘needing’ to buy currency, that’s pretty shit. And I think it’s pretty mean-spirited to split a chapter into more than 4 parts…
Because most chapters are split into parts, the update icons aren’t really that useful since I would very much prefer to read a chapter in it’s entirety.

I really hope SQEX implement a subscription system because atm it does feel like a bit of a ‘chore’ to log in twice a day to read chapters. I have nothing against spending money to read manga, but the current system really is not good value (especially to only rent). Reading manga is a hobby so I would like to be able to read at my leisure rather than be a slave to SQEX’s schedule. If the series weren’t so great I very likely would have quickly dropped this app.

Another complaint…I do feel like the app is a bit deceitful and it definitely does rub me the wrong way. The whole ‘you can read 8 chapters a day!’ is actually ‘you can read 4 chapter-segments within this particular 12 hour period and then another 4 in the next 12 hour period’. Which is a real stretch from the obvious way people will interpret the statement. And I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt with the chapter splitting and assume some sort of AI/automated process is taking care of the splits, but there’s that niggling feeling in the back of my mind that they really are doing this on purpose which is just manipulative and gross.

But at the end of the day, it’s more quality manga being accessible in a legal (and I guess free) way. And honestly if SQEX did introduce a subscription system I would switch to reading all the overlapping series with Crunchyroll Manga to Manga UP 😅 To end on a more positive note here are the series I’m enjoying the most so far 😊

The Apothecary Diaries

Mystery, science and an awesome main character, I love it.

Daemons of the Shadow Realm

Hiromu Arakawa in fine form as per usual. I’m a sucker for the whole ‘reaction to the modern world’ kinda humour 😋

The Gender of Mona Lisa

I like it, but I’m also on the fence about it since it deals with quite sensitive issues. It’s the kind of series where the ending will make or break it IMO.